Appeasement and Putin: A Three-Way Debate

I: Patrick Morgan

How embarrassing for Tom Switzer! The Russians, whose views he has recently been providing excuses for, have let him down. Just after he wrote in the October Quadrant that Putin’s “foreign policy has been reactive and defensive”, merely protecting his own borders, Putin has expanded his pattern of aggression by moving his military might into the Middle East, hardly part of Russia’s “near abroad”. And just when Switzer has written that Iran’s “capacity to overturn the international order is exceedingly limited”, Iran is sending troops into Syria to further destabilise a theatre of war not in Iran’s bailiwick.

How did Switzer get it so wrong? First, because he keeps writing the same article imposing a preconceived “big picture” foreign-policy template onto events, irrespective of the changing facts on the ground. And, more importantly, because he fails to understand Putin, by naively believing that what Putin says are his motives are his motives. With Putin it is not his changing rationalisations which are important, but his unchanging personality.

Switzer argues, following the fashionable US “new realist” school of thinking, that the West—the US, EU and Nato—have caused the present imbroglio by acting aggressively since the fall of communism, by expanding Nato and the EU up to Putin’s doorstep, which has forced him to act defensively to reassert hegemony over his buffer states. This of course just happens to be Putin’s own rationalisation—funny, that. The reality is that between the fall of communism and the rise of Putin. the West did everything it could to help Russia and Eastern Europe recover—money and advisers from the IMF, World Bank and elsewhere were poured in, Russia was welcomed into the G7 and G20 to assist its move back into the comity of nations, and no military action to cripple it was taken by the US or Nato in those years when it was vulnerable. It was not Nato but the former satellite countries which were clambering to expand Nato by getting into it, because they knew from hard experience they needed protection from an uncomfortable neighbour, the family from hell, and they were right to do so. Contra Switzer, Russia was mollified by the West after 1989, Russia has been the aggressor and the West the rather meek reactor. Switzer ignores all this because facts on the ground are not his territory. He enjoys endless Spenglerian speculation on motives and perspectives at which he considers himself an overnight expert, having no previous track record of knowledge of this part of the world.

Take one matter which Switzer naturally has amnesia about. In the mid-1990s Russia and Ukraine signed a pact in which Ukraine, encouraged by the West, agreed to surrender its nuclear stockpile and to allow Russia to retain its Crimean naval base, in exchange for a guarantee that Russia would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. In this agreement Ukraine had to surrender two assets, which made it more militarily vulnerable, whereas Russia had to surrender nothing, except abide by standard international norms. Russia has twice torn up the agreement, by its incursions in Crimea and the Donbas. This history flies in the face of the neat, self-proving Switzer narrative of Western pressure.

Switzer never discusses the internal situation in Russia, for good reasons, because if he did, he would understand Putin’s mentality and the wellsprings of his foreign policy. Putin allows no opposition—anyone who shows the slightest signs of dissent is threatened or loses his job, or is stripped of his wealth, or imprisoned, or forced abroad, or deported, or imprisoned, or mysteriously murdered. Putin’s biographer Masha Gessen says he has one message: “Don’t mess with me, or …”—in other words he is inherently aggressive in his very DNA. You don’t need complex international relations theory to understand this. He is a common garden Leninist-Stalinist of the KGB variety, for whom brutal power and domination is a first and only resort. He is scared of the Russian people, so he can’t allow them a free election.

One principal reason for Putin’s moving on Ukraine has nothing to do with buffer-state consolidation. East Europeans are now free and enjoying building up the economy and stability of their newly liberated nations. And they know how to get rid of oppressors by conducting a spontaneous non-military national uprising from below, as with Solidarity in Poland and the Maidan movement in Kiev. (Switzer wrongly calls it a “coup”, which just happens to be Putin’s term for it.) With Russia’s crumbling infrastructure, poor living conditions and lack of freedom, Putin cannot allow contented states next door, as the contrast gets greater as every year passes. Switzer seems oblivious to Putin’s internal drives, which co-ordinate with and explain his external ones. He treats Ukraine as he treats his Russian opposition, with threats, physical intimidation, economic strangulation, and ultimate dismemberment.

Switzer thinks of everything from the aggressor’s—Russia’s—point of view. But let’s look at it from a victim’s—Ukraine’s—position. From 1920 to 1945 Ukraine had unwanted Soviet terror of an unparalleled kind, first a deliberately induced famine which killed millions, then the Nazi-Soviet pact which caused the borderlands of Poland and Ukraine to become the bloodlands, with the Holocaust following the Holodomor, then back to “normal” imperial domination from 1945 to 1990. The crucial point since is that Russia has never apologised and compensated Ukraine for all  this. Russia has had no lustration, it is in denial over these horrors. Worse, Putin wants to revive the Soviet Union, and instead of sympathising with Ukraine’s fate and repairing the damage, he is repeating the dose by moving in for a second bite. And Switzer is providing for Western eyes a rationale for him to do this.

Putin has recently complained that 25 million Russians now living outside Russia are being badly treated, so he will act as their protector and saviour. Let’s look at this problem since 1989. These 25 million were not visitors or tourists caught overnight in 1989 by events, but the sinews of a brutal invading imperialist army and bureaucracy. When communism collapsed whole Soviet formations were abandoned by Russia, their pay cut off, and they had to fend for themselves, or find their way home if they wanted to. Since then Russia has made no effort to repatriate them, nor to pay their welfare and settlement costs abroad, a formidable financial burden for poor countries like Kazakhstan and the Baltic states, while Russia has been rolling in oil and gas revenues. When the Soviet Union collapsed, 90 per cent of Ukrainians voted for independence, and polls over the next two decades have reinforced this view. Now a quarter of a century later Russians abroad are not going home for obvious reasons—in Russia you are not free. They have been gradually assimilating in their new homelands with few problems and complaints. They were not calling for Russian help, until a few years ago when Putin artificially started up such a campaign. Instead of feeding them with food and shelter, Putin is feeding them with high-powered television disinformation.

Revisionist academics have in the past argued that the US was to blame for the Cold War. Now their “realist” successors are arguing that (guess who?) the US and the West are to blame for the present troubles in Eastern Europe. In all Tom Switzer’s recent writings in the Australian and elsewhere a mono-causal prejudice reverberates like a liturgical mantra—the West is the aggressor, the West is wrong, and the West is to blame.

II: Andrew Bilinsky

We cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.—President Obama on Russia’s actions in Ukraine at the UN General Assembly, September 28,2015

I was surprised that Tom Switzer needed Quadrant to be another vehicle for his already well-promoted pro-Kremlin geopolitical views, where it concerns Ukraine.

Mr Switzer sees no problem in President Putin disregarding international law and has no issue when it comes to the numerous international treaties Russia has violated and is still violating. He talks about geopolitics and the grievances that Russia has suffered with the dissolution of the USSR. This dissolution President Putin regards as the biggest tragedy of the twentieth century. That the Kremlin murdered millions of Ukrainians who resisted or were regarded as possible enemies of the ruthless communist regime that was thrust on them is a somewhat more significant tragedy.

Does Mr Switzer remember that President Putin denied any involvement in the takeover of Crimea, then later admitted he had been planning it all along and handed out medals to his invading army? Now President Putin denies his people are in Ukraine, when the world knows they indeed are there. There are spy satellites hovering above that can see what is happening on the ground. The corporations who had been doing business with Russia would never accept sanctions without good evidence of Russia’s transgressions.

Nato has been liaising with Russia for years and has posed no military threat to Russia, and as events have shown, it has neither the armoury nor the desire to confront Russia. The West has even been supplying military technology to Russia’s armed forces. Former countries of the USSR and its former satellites have joined Nato. Having experienced life under Kremlin control they requested Nato membership. There has been no existential threat to Russia because of their choice.

The 1994 Budapest Memoran­dum guaranteed the territorial integrity and borders of Ukraine, an agreement signed by the US, UK and Russia with much fanfare in exchange for the handing over of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, the third-biggest in the world.

It is difficult to imagine how the Russian Federation, the biggest territory in the world by far, should feel itself encircled. Why should Russia need a buffer state to protect it when a tiny country like Estonia does not? Russia can set up buffer zones on its own territory if it needs to. And from what and whom are the Russians to be protected? How exactly has Russia been threatened? It could not be by Ukraine, as it had already been effectively disarmed by the Yanukovych regime.

As late as early 2014 a majority of Ukrainians showed no desire to join Nato. It was after the battle of Ilovaysk in Eastern Ukraine in August 2014 that the attitude of Ukrainians towards Russia and Russians changed markedly. During that battle Russian forces slaughtered some 400 Ukrainian soldiers who had been assured of safe passage during their retreat. It is no surprise that Ukrainians have never been as united against Russia as they are now. Today a large majority of Ukrainians are aspiring for security within Nato.

The Minsk agreements have been ineffective, with Russia and its proxies constantly breaking them and even gaining more territory at the time of signing. This occurred with the battle of Debaltseve. Every day long-range guns and rockets provided by Russia are killing Ukrainian servicemen, volunteers and civilians. During lulls in fighting, Russia has been busy shipping armoury to its proxies and its regular Russian forces inside Ukraine to test its latest weapons. Russia is now building new military bases near the Ukrainian border.

When it comes to the issue of President Putin’s desire to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, it is worth noting that over 60 per cent of Ukrainian forces fighting in the Donbas are Russian speakers. Most Ukrainians are bilingual, as Russian-language use has come from ruthless Russification programs and ethnocide of the Ukrainian people by the Russian empire and the USSR.

There was no coup in Ukraine in 2014. The military was not involved, and President Yanukovych, who in his time had brought kleptocracy to a breathtaking art form, fled for Russia at his own volition.

The situation that led to President Yanukovych’s departure is well known. Peaceful street protests were sparked by Yanukovych’s refusal, after two decades of negotiations, to sign an agreement that was to commit Ukraine to economic, judicial and financial reforms and to converge its policies and legislation with those of the European Union. This refusal followed years of relentless economic and political incursion by Russia. This background to the Maidan protests is something Mr Switzer disregards.

President Yanukovych’s use of deadly violence to disperse the protests, resulting in many deaths and serious injuries, galvanised the population and members of parliament against his regime. European mediators came to negotiate between President Yanukovych and opposition parties, at which time Yanukovych agreed to stay on and call early parliamentary elections.

I am sure if Mr Switzer had some idea of how elections took place in Ukraine at the time of Yanukovych’s election he would not use words such as “democratically elected” so readily. Fraud and blatant vote-buying were rampant. Soon after his election, Yanukovych incarcerated the opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko. So much for his democracy!

Ukraine is good real estate and a rich country that since the dissolution of the USSR has had its potential robbed by oligarchs aided by corrupt politicians enjoying parliamentary immunity from prosecution. The newly democratically elected Poroshenko government is now seeking to eradicate this kind of corruption. With Russia undermining the Ukrainian economy with the war, their reform task is akin to repairing an aeroplane while it is in flight.

The apologists for Russian geopolitics in the Western media and in Western universities and think-tanks do no service to the Ukrainian people, whose sons and daughters are dying in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Their views also show no respect for the principles of international law. Ironically, such apologists enjoy freedom of speech that is denied to their academic and journalist counterparts in Russia.

The Kremlin has an army of trolls on its payroll in the West and in Russia spreading disinformation. This propaganda is designed to fool the citizens of the Russian Federation and the West, and unfortunately a section of Western academia and media are taken in by it.

Just like Australians, Ukrainians have every right to determine their future and not be set up as some sort of “buffer state” for an imperialist neighbour. As an Australian citizen, with no other allegiances or passports, I consider Ukraine to be fortunate to have the support of the Australian government to counter the invasion by Russia.

III: Tom Switzer

Sorry for sounding like the pub bore, but let me remind Patrick Morgan and Andrew Bilinsky that a failure to deal with the world as it really is obstructs clear thinking about international relations. So too is a refusal to bring commitments and power into balance and to put yourself in your adversary’s shoes and see the world from that perspective.

Morgan and Bilinsky instead rely on wishful thinking. They do not recognise the limitations of Western powers in a region where no US army has fought. Nor do they take into account the sensitivities of a (declining) great power in an area that has been in Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries. This is a foolish and dangerous way of conducting foreign policy.

From the outset of the Ukrainian crisis in February 2014, foreign-policy realists like me have tried to explain Moscow’s response to what most Russians deem a genuine threat to their nation’s vital interests. If we understand their motivations, their conduct is easy to understand, which is not to say we have to like it. But we do need to understand what caused this crisis if we are to have any hope of resolving it.

Like most Russians, including Boris Yeltsin before him, Putin viewed years of Nato and EU expansion, culminating in the commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West, as a direct threat to Russia’s core strategic interests. If Putin were an aggressor bent on recreating the former Soviet empire, why hasn’t Russia invaded Kiev or even all of the Donbas? Where is the evidence he had decided to take over Crimea before the pro-Russian government’s downfall on February 22, 2014? Morgan and Bilinsky never ask, let alone answer, these questions, and they deny that Washington did back the protesters, which helped escalate the crisis and topple President Yanukovych, who was democratically elected.

Morgan and Bilinsky imply that the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago has meant the end of power politics. If only the West would line up to declare our solidarity with the little bloke and decry the interference of big bullies who deny countries like Ukraine the “right to determine their future”. But such self-righteous indignation ignores an old truth of geopolitics. Great powers, as University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer has pointed out in Foreign Affairs, live by different rules than minor ones and are acutely sensitive to threats in their neighbourhood. There is nothing “new” about this realism: it is the way the world works, and always has. Did the US allow communist Cuba to form a military alliance with Moscow and invite the Soviets to put nuclear weapons in the Western hemisphere? Will the Chinese allow Taiwan to declare its independence?

Morgan and Bilinsky highlight the sanctity of the (non-binding) 1994 deal: in exchange for relinquishing Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, Russia would respect its territorial sovereignty. Never mind that great powers—including the US—have a long record of breaking promises as well as international law. Washington promised Moscow that in exchange for a reunified Germany’s inclusion in Nato twenty-five years ago it would not expand the Cold War pact east of Berlin. And never mind that since the elected Ukrainian government was overthrown by violence in February 2014, Moscow believed with good reason all negotiations with Kiev became nullified, because it was no longer seen as a legal government.

Morgan and Bilinsky would be well advised to stop thinking as Wilsonian idealists and start thinking like hard-nosed strategists. If they did, they would recognise that Putin has a deep-seated interest in getting Washington and Brussels to back off from trying to integrate Ukraine into the West and in making it instead a neutral buffer state. They would also recognise that the West has no interest in confronting Russia militarily in an area where Moscow has a huge tactical advantage in both conventional and short-range nuclear forces, and where the balance of resolve favours Russia, because it cares much more than the West about Ukraine’s future.

As for Syria, Morgan says Russia’s power play undermines my belief that Putin’s conduct has been defensive and reactive. Not true. The Western powers have sought to topple the Assad regime, which is Russia’s only ally in the Middle East. (Morgan should consult a map of the old Ottoman empire: it is much closer to Russia than he suggests.) Putin fears that if Assad falls, Russia’s presence in western Syria and its strategic naval base on the Mediterranean will be gone. That is why Russia is flexing its military muscles in western Syria. And by reaching an understanding with Damascus as well as Tehran and Baghdad to share intelligence about Islamic State, Putin shows that Russia is taking on the very Sunni jihadists that the US and its allies have declared as a grave and present danger which must be degraded and destroyed.

I am a friend of the Ukrainian people, not an adversary. A policy of a neutral Ukraine that many other realists (such as Mearsheimer, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Walt, Stephen Cohen) advocate would lead to a stable and maybe even prosperous Ukraine and greatly reduce any chance of war. It is designed to do good for Ukrainians of all stripes and put an end to the civil war. The Minsk accords of February 2015 can help ensure a prosperous but neutral Ukraine that does not threaten Russia and allows the US and its allies to repair their relations with Moscow.

But the solution of Morgan, Bilinsky and other hyperventilating pundits will cause Ukraine to be wrecked, which will inflict massive pain on the divided Ukrainian people. Moreover, it runs the risk of causing a war between two nuclear powers. The choice, you would think, is obvious.